‘The Convert’

by Greta Stoddart; introduced by Andrew McCulloch

B
efore she became a writer, Greta Stoddart trained as an actress and toured
for five years with the Chaplinesque physical theatre group Brouhaha.
Although the transition from gestural performance to articulate expression
might seem rather abrupt, the École Jacques Lecoq she attended when she left
school encouraged its students to explore “le silence d’où s’élève les mots”
– the silence out of which words emerge – that deep, wordless source from
which mime and poetry both spring. Fittingly enough, “The Convert”, the
opening poem from Stoddart’s debut collection At Home in the Dark
(2001), presents us with an image of the poet, at night, surrounded by “her
things”, like so many theatre props. Marcel Marceau said that mime can “make
the invisible, visible and the visible, invisible”. Stoddart begins by
suggesting that poetry, too, can encourage us to retreat into the dark
theatre of the mind, where even a bedroom at night is strewn with narrative
potential, our lives no more real than an old, half-remembered story. By the
end of the poem, however, it is clear that you have first to love darkness,
silence and solitude if you want to see and hear what they can reveal; only
then can you show it to someone else.

The Convert

It could be the way some women slip
into minor when they sing their children to sleep,
or those baleful stories night after night
whose soft iambics set the pace for dreams

that ensures a good handful of us
will find ourselves at home in the dark
as if such subtle plantings of love or tone
could bloom into a shying from the light.

Take this one here who can’t sleep (again)
adrift in her room, surrounded by her things –
the bed, the chair, the empty shoe,
the desk shaky on its heron legs –

cast now in the storm light of a negative
while she looks and learns to pass the time;
watch her then as she turns to a book
so long unopened her eyes spring with tears.

Or could it be at the age of four,
that first display that flipped the switch,
the curved black acres, the hard little stars
that made this child no longer care

for the seeable horizon, the bright seasons?
Let’s say it was for that one high-
arch perspective that she made the leap
of faith before she’d learnt to walk with reason.